Time takes its crazy Poll... Sonic Youth: Washing Machine

i went from being a massive sonic youth fan in the 80s to barely listening to them in the 90s and then getting some of those 2000s album, possibly for nostalgic reasons. i've never heard washing machine (or dirty or a thousand leaves for that matter). maybe i might listen to it today

of those three i'd start with dirty, it was my first complete album by them and is still my fave. i think it's more punk and less prog, that's why i love it.

Surprised at the (general) lack of love for 'Becuz'. Top 5 Kim song for me!

I voted for title track. This was the great white whale in my teenage record collection; I think I finally heard it for the first time a couple years ago

Voting Washing Machine because the bit where it turns into CCR still thrills me

Haha yeah, it starts chooglin' like 70s Crazy Horse... plus Kim's vox in that part are great.

NickB I am legit shocked by that, may you enjoy those great great records as much as I do

Surprised at the (general) lack of love for 'Becuz'. Top 5 Kim song for me!

It's my #2.

omg i love "becuz"

hard not to vote for diamond sea, but washing machine might actually be my fav.

this was my first sy album.

and "the diamond sea" was my introduction to long-form psychedelic guitar music, so it feels like the right choice

Stuck between "Unwind" and "Saucer-Like."

I almost voted for "Unwind", it's so gorgeous

Saucer-Like > Washing Machine > Unwind > Little Trouble Girl is their prettiest 4 song run ever.

Saucer-Like is an easy pick for me. Lee is great and this is one of his best tracks.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

skip tracer. the guitar sound / riffs on this track are gorgeous

Polled...yet totally screwed up

the guitar guy played real cool feedback and super sounding riffs

honey, here's a quarter

^giving this another spin rn. Still sounds f'in awesome

the guitar guy played real cool feedback and super sounding riffs

this part is about Mecca Normal btw

"If you want me to..."

Voted for title track, which just oozes warmth and so many crazy hooks, but Skip Tracer is also one of my favorite of theirs. A bit uneven (could skip Panty Lines ans Little Trouble Girl) but this is usually the SY album I recommend to people.

hello 2016

Passages of No Queen Blues make you think of YYYs' "No no no".
This album is better than the Goo-Dirty period, but it still lacks something, especially in that middle section: it's alright but not gripping.
Kinda hard to vote for anything else than The Diamond Sea.

the guitar guy played real cool feedback and super sounding riffs

this part is about Mecca Normal btw

Ha! Mecca Normal was my first live music experience when I saw them open for Sonic Youth in '93.

xxp

the guitar guy played real cool feedback and super sounding riffs

this part is about Mecca Normal btw

Ha! Mecca Normal was my first live music experience when I saw them open for Sonic Youth in '93.

it's one of those albums where the title totally turned me off. i think i maybe listened twice to it and got terribly bored. the diamond sea was lauded everywhere, it is by far the best thing on the album but i must say that i much prefer my sonic youth short and fast and not long and slow.

love this album so much. voted for "washing machine" narrowly ahead of "becuz", "unwind", "skip tracer" and "the diamond sea", but really i love everything here.

I like the top-rated comment on the youtube for the diamond sea:

yoyoyoyoyoyoyooyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyooyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyooyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyo

i much prefer my sonic youth short and fast and not long and slow

I am exactly the opposite!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Panty Lies deserved a vote for being the most dissonant / atonal "song" SY ever recorded (according to the WM wiki). Love it

I'm good with these results

Damn a lot of people participated!

Sonic Youth is as close to a consensus band for ILX as it gets really.

Panty Lies deserved a vote for being the most dissonant / atonal "song" SY ever recorded (according to the WM wiki). Love it

― flappy bird

Panty Lies has distinct tonality

Are you hearing F# as the tonal centre?

I don't know, i'd have to sit with a keyboard with it. I usually play by ear, never *really* learned how to read music, save for the basics. I can't recognize arbitrary (out of the air) frequencies or pitches--like "that's a C#" without first having a reference point. I was thinking about it (the main, clean guitar figure) last night, without listening to it.. it definitely seems tonal? There's a high register, sort of skree-ing guitar part that appears later on in the track--not sure if it agrees (wholly; harmonically / consonantly) with the main riff (it seems to?) ... it does seem tonal. The primary riff of the song seems to establish a definite tone (or tonality) for the duration of the track, though I don't really know music theory.

Checking with my guitar and double-checking with Chris Lawrence's tabs: The bass does seem to ground it on F# (by mostly staying on that note!), as well as the way the vocal line comes back to F# on the repeated "air-air-air-air-air-air-air-air" refrains. It largely seems to be built around semitones and tritones, though. The main guitar riff alternates between D#-E, then between E-F, before hammering on a dissonant chord under the refrain that seems to be made of F, a bunch of F#s, and a B (016). Lee plays an A (a tritone from D#) under the D#-E bit and an F# under the E-F bit, I think. The vocal melody goes something like D#-G-F(-G-F) before landing on the F#. Then in the second verse, Thurston's starts a whole tone lower and the bass drops to D. The vocal line here seems to mostly ascend from C# to F#, though we might get G#s later.

Tbh, Kim's vocal and lyrics on this song often annoy me but breaking it down a bit helped bring home just how dissonant it gets and reminded me of how deliciously uneasy it could feel.

Sund4r, as a music theory know-nothing and a deep lover of this album and band, it is a joy to read your formal breakdown. I hope there's more of this kind of discussion.

Aw, thanks, I'm glad. Maybe I'll have time to tackle "No Queen Blues" tomorrow if we get another snow day.

In the meantime, here's a rocking live version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiVP8xfLfWg

that's a great song, i had totally forgotten about it.

Sund4r, did you manage to catch which "note" the high-pitched feedback is? - it appears at some point, mid-way through the song, and it's not atonal

also does atonality = the inharmonicity of the closely-related frequencies / notes ? or is it an arbitrary-ness (western tonality-wise) of the general "chord" structures?

The broad meaning of atonality = the absence of a tonal centre, i.e. the piece of music is not in any key. Most music has a tonal centre (or tonic): one pitch that can be seen as most 'important' and functions as a sort of gravitational centre, usually giving the listener some kind of sense of stability when it is returned to. (So when "I Want You Back" is in the key of Ab major, part of what this means is that the note Ab - the first and last note of the famous bass riff - is the tonal centre, for example.) Other pitches have different hierarchical roles in relation to this central pitch - the note that is a fifth above the tonic is usually of major importance (and the second-last note of that riff is Eb, a fifth above Ab, as is the first note of the vocal melody). Melodies and chord progressions are usually built around this system (which is what I think you're getting at with your second option). Even music that is not built around chord progressions can have a tonal centre, though, e.g. in Indian classical music. Atonal music, e.g. Schoenberg from 1909 on, does away with this hierarchical system of pitch organization and does not place any one pitch as a centre. The organizational principles that replace it can be highly varied.

I do think F# mostly functions as a centre in "Panty Lies", through the brute force of the bassline and the refrain, but it does seem interesting how dissonant and chromatic it is - any feeling of resolution at that refrain is undermined by the dissonance of Thurston's chord there; it is hard to identify any harmonic progression. (Obv, these are ideas that this band has played with elsewhere as well.)

Linking this discussion on the music theory thread

Doesn't sound atonal to me, it just sounds like he's imitating the lead guitar on "Friction", mangling a melodic minor scale and rendering its changeable pitches non-functional

Television's "Friction"?

Well well well.

https://recordstoreday.com/SpecialRelease/20051

32 live performances of Sonic Youth’s “The Diamond Sea” plunderphoniclly orchestrated by John Oswald (of Grateful Dead "Grayfolded" fame) – providing two distinctly new experiences of the classic track from Washing Machine.
Side A features 1995 performances exclusively while side B spotlights only 1996 performances.
Each side clocks in at precisely 20:44. A sonic experience that will spin dry your ears!

Assuming Lee Ranaldo was the point person here.

omg

I need it now

hell yeah

I saw SY 4 times I think and the 1995 show was easily the best, hope we get some provenance on the versions collaged here, would be a nice connection

(Is there a “live albums made from gigs you were at” thread??)

I swear there is, but I can't find it

I own several!

If it's like the one he did for the Dead's "Dark Star", it'll have a nice chart inside the booklet with all that info (I'm hoping for it anyway!).

Just hoping the "RSD First" tag does indeed mean a wider release later because uh, 3500 copies ain't gonna go far that day.

that is generally what RSD First means but yeah fuck me I might go stand in line

Pains me to say it but we may be overestimating the appeal of this with the RSD crowd

I'm not so sure about that, considering 80% of the band's official Instagram stories are reposting younger kids and their Sonic Youth vinyl collection (a very good thing, mind!). I think this is gonna be a very popular pick up that day.

I bet it won't be toooooo hard to come by. maybe i'm wrong!
should be cool though. Lee has been talking about doing something like this for a while, but I didn't know he was actually going to get John Oswald to do it!

🤟🏽

so, Diamond Seas

- white vinyl!

- baffling at first and different from Grayfolded as noted in the RSD thread

- reading Oswald's notes and charts help it make sense, this is basically like a Zaireeka style stacking exercise although then meticulously micro-edited

- the studio version is mixed in as well, at least on the a-side

Here's what I said in the RSD thread: Had another round of Diamond Seas, this time on headphones which helped a lot as you can better appreciate the overlaying bits and discern the different textures of various recordings.

Oswald being the compiler/composer set my expectations to something Grayfolded-like, but of course the source material, let alone intention what to do with it, were different. This is like a fever dream of bootleg tapes.

This is like a fever dream of bootleg tapes.

OTM

If you told me Thurst had cobbled this together with a couple of tape decks in '96 and released it through the fan club in '97 I would believe you

hmmm, this does not sound essential

it's not, but it's a fun and absorbing listen

haha I am enjoying the angry Discogs comments/reviews

"it sounds like a bootleg" - gee I wonder why?

"the transitions are so obvious" - you mean the short singing part where Oswald is seamlessly shifting between verses using different takes? because a ton of the rest is heavily mixed and I can't hear any transitions at all

don't know where to put this, but saw this film last night - a collection of Tamra Davis' Hi8 footage from the Summersault Festival in Australia and some festivals in Southeast Asia in late 1995 & early 1996

I would say it felt like a really great DVD bonus feature rather than an actual film - essentially an artfully edited compilation of home movies, but the home movies featured some incredible bands somewhere around their peak - and some fun backstage and downtime footage and interviews, often contacted by a fun and charming Kathleen Hanna

ANYWAY thread relevance because there is some excellent footage of SY playing Washing Machine (the song) and also Bull in the Heather and 100% - as mentioned above this tour was the only time I saw Sonic Youth and they were amazing - the footage is low res and single camera but Davis has a really great sense of what is interesting onstage and the (mostly) lack of cutting away really lets the energy come through

Also some great Beasties footage, Pavement, the Amps, Bikini Kill, Beck and - for some reason, the terrible band Rancid

lol it was NOT the only time I saw Sonic Youth, but far and away the best

beck played an acoustic set at these shows and i remember Sonic Youth finished their set with an epic version of Diamond Sea - then over on the second stage once the feedback died away Beck started playing, and his first song was The Diamond Sea, it was pretty funny